Tag: UFC 126

(Contrary to what this painting implies, Minowa will not be taking on Gabe “Godzilla” Rudiger. Seems like a wasted opportunity to us.)

India-based promotion Super Fight League is quickly making waves in the MMA landscape. Aside from being the first promotion to sign an exclusive broadcast deal with Youtube, they’ve managed to sign UFC veterans Todd Duffee and Trevor Prangley and held a mildly successful first event earlier this month. Sure, Bob Sapp was there, a sentiment we are getting sicker and sicker of typing, but just listen to SFL’s theme song and tell us that these gentlemen are not on the short path to success. Go ahead. We’ll be right here. Haaaaangin out.

But if you weren’t convinced by Super Fight League’s first event, then you will be more than happy to learn that they’ve decided to move on from the undisputed queen of freak show fights in Sapp to the undisputed king of freak show fights in Ikuhisa Minowa for their next event. Oh yes, one of the greatest fighters to never hold a major title will be taking on two time Bellator middleweight tournament winner Alexander Shlemenko at SFL 2, which goes down on April 7th from Chandigarh, India.

We last saw Minowaman in action at the “meh” ProElite 3 event, where he was outpointed by TUF 3 winner Kendall Grove. True to form, Minowa rebounded from the loss by picking up a first round submission over a 1-6 fighter that I am not going to bother looking up again because I already closed the tab. The Super Hulk Champion could be in for a long night against Shlemenko, a 44-7 kickboxing expert who showcased an improved submission game in his Bellator 50 guillotine joke victory over Zelg Galesic. If this fight features anything less than ten spinning backfists and a dropkick we will eat our hats.

I’m sure you have your favorites that you’ll share with your grandkids when you’re sitting in the old man’s chair. But have you ever stopped and asked yourself which moments in the past two decades were the biggest on a large scale? Well I did and I went to the largest scale imaginable: the almighty Google and here’s what I found. Remember, Google doesn’t have emotional or monetary interest at stake here. These moments are the ones that have generated the most web traffic via searches, not which ones impacted the sport the most.

Why it’s ranked: Jake Shields left Strikeforce as champion so essentially casual fans and mainstream media alike viewed this as the first major inter-promotional, champion vs. champion fight. Georges St. Pierre, reigning UFC Welterweight champion and winner of nine straight came out on top of Shields who was riding a fifteen-fight win streak over the past five years.

The UFC went all in on this one hyping this event with the normal Countdown shows in addition to a pretty sweet commercial, the Primetime series, and a flyer in my mailbox reminding me to order the PPV. It was a huge moment in both men’s career primarily because it was the first tough competition either had faced in quite some time up to that point. The underlying reason this mattered so much is that we all wanted to see the GSP vs. Silva super fight.

(We looked and looked, but all we could find was this photo of Jim Belushi. Pic: The Fab Life)

At this rate, we’ll never be rid of this goddamn vampire. We’d hoped for a quick and quiet departure from MMA for Steven Seagal – kind of a one-off creep-and-lurk session at UFC 126 – but now that his second straight appearance in the corner of a Black House fighter has ended in a second straight front kick knockout, we don’t see that happening. While it is still totally unclear if Lyoto Machida and Anderson Silva are just fucking with us (and by extension, with him) by professing their allegiances to Seagal, this week Out for Justice himself stopped by Sherdog Radio to assure us all that this shit is deadly serious.

As part of a nearly 20-minute interview, Seagal broke down Lyoto Machida’s jumping KO of Randy Couture at last weekend’s UFC 129. You know, as much as he could without giving away all the secrets of his deadly arts. He also promised to keep working with Black House fighters on new, top-secret techniques. Worst of all, it appears he’s begun referring to Machida and Silva as “his guys.” The quotes are after the jump.

ATTENTION, POTATO NATION. As part of our ongoing efforts to dominate every aspect of the MMA media landscape, we’re putting together a weekly video series called “MMAshed Potato,” in which we run down the week’s top MMA stories and must-see videos. I know what you’re thinking — a weekly series in which a dude stands in front of a green-screen and makes snarky comments? Totallyunprecedented!

Anyway, we sent three of our friends to film test pilots at Break Media headquarters in L.A., gave them a list of topics and themes to work off of, and filmed the ensuing chaos. (The shoot took place right after UFC 126, so forgive us if this stuff feels like ancient history.) Guys, we don’t ask you for much, but if you have any love at all for this site, you’ll do the following: Watch all three videos after the jump, and vote for your favorite host in the homepage poll over there on the right. And please feel free to share constructive criticism in the comments section. Thanks so much…

Franklin lost the fight by unanimous decision, and we quickly forgot about this silly business — except Franklin didn’t. An MMAFighting report came out Friday claiming that Ace had actually visited a tattoo shop to honor the bet that nobody thought was real. Responding to the news, Griffin said:

(Two very different ends of the agony/compensation spectrum. Images courtesy of MMAFighting.com)

The UFC shelled out over $1.6 million in disclosed salaries and bonuses to the fighters who competed at UFC 126, and damn, some of these dudes are making bank. Good to see it. The numbers are below, courtesy of MMAJunkie. Keep in mind that these salary totals don’t include additional income from sponsorships, undisclosed "locker room" bonuses, and (potentially, for some headliners) percentages of the pay-per-view revenue, or deductions for taxes, licensing fees, and insurance.

"Thank you, Anderson, for revealing yet another weakness for me to exploit in our rematch,” Sonnen said, or emailed as it seems. “Beating that poor punching bag doesn’t impress Uncle Chael, guy. You tipped your hand like a chump poker player at a $5 table in Atlantic City. You may have beaten Vitor, but in the process, you LOST your edge. By beating that husk, you gave me the last page of your playbook. Revel in your time, (because) it ENDS the night you face me. I will mow you down like autumn wheat, AGAIN."

Yeah, at this point, Sonnen’s patter is starting to feel pretty desperate. He’s like a serial killer who just keeps confessing to made-up crimes because the thing that scares him most is that people will lose interest in him. Also, we already know that his opinions are as malleable as a Roman gladiator’s sexuality, but referring to Belfort as “that poor punching bag” and “that husk” constitutes a 180-degree turnabout from what he said about “The Phenom” almost a year ago to the day.

When Anderson Silva mentioned in his post-UFC 126 fight interview that Steven Seagal taught him the front kick that he knocked Vitor Belfort out with Saturday night most of the MMA community were willing to give the Hard to Kill, Out for Justice Lawman the benefit of the doubt, but when the Marked for Death, Above the Law Glimmer Man told reporters that he invented the textbook front kick, we weren’t the only ones who called bullshit.

Here’s what Seagal had to say to MMA Heat’s Karyn Bryant about Silva’s win:

"I couldn’t have been happier, because right before he walked out I said to him, ‘Stay away from him for the first, you know, two, three minutes, just kind of get him frustrated and fake low and come high and do that kick I’ve been teaching you and kick him in the head or the face. He did exactly what I said and exactly what I wanted to happen and I was very, very proud of him…I was raised in Japan under some of the greatest karate masters and jiu-jitsu masters to live in our time and I learned that kick 40 years ago or 30 years….35…I don’t know — a long, long time ago and I worked for the last 35 years or so to perfect it."

Well, the last few seconds were outstanding. Most of the rest of the televised portion of UFC 126 was extremely middle-of-the-road, but in the end no hyperbole was needed: Anderson Silva – that magnificent bastard — front kicked Vitor Belfort in the face and knocked him out. No, we’ve never, ever seen anything like it before and probably never, ever will again. It was, in a word, awesome and underscored why (no matter how lackluster the rest of a UFC PPV seems) you absolutely must watch until the bitter end. Just in case something amazing happens. Because sometimes it does. So amazing in fact that all across the country on Saturday night, aging karate masters and mail-order blackbelts jumped out of their seats and shouted, “See? I told you that shit worked!”

As for the rest of us, our abusive relationship with the UFC middleweight champion goes on. Let’s be honest here, through the first three minutes, 20 seconds, it appeared as if Silva and Belfort were conspiring to make Dana White’s nightmare of “the worst staring contest in the history of mankind” come true. Silva came out and circled, and shucked, and even did some stupid dancing just like he did against Demian Maia last April. The initial physical contact of the fight didn’t come until 1:40 into the first, when Belfort nicked Silva with a leg kick. Then, just as the grim reality of his suckiness started to set in all over again – just as we started to think of all the other things we could’ve spent that $50 on – boom, front kick to the face. Game over. And we love him again.

(Above: "…and I’m gonna wear one of those stupid jester-hats in the Octagon. And you’re not going to do a damn thing about it." Below: Jon Jones knows that the best way to deal with a bully is to ignore him, Michihiro Omigawa does that ridiculous duck-face thing, and Miguel Torres and Antonio Banuelos face off for the unofficial Mexican Bantamweight Championship. All photos courtesy of the UFC 126: Weigh In Pics gallery on CombatLifestyle.com)

Fuck football. Unless you were cursed enough to grow up in Green Bay, or you’re a supporter of dudes who get accused of rape a lot, you know as well as I do that this weekend belongs to cage-fighting. And if you don’t, you can piss off right now. Seriously. The rest of us will wait.

Now then. Tonight’s ultra-stacked lineup features the longest-reigning champion in UFC history defending his middleweight title for the eighth time against a power-punching dynamo who used to be a UFC champion himself, seven years and one weight-class ago. Supporting the main event will be a scrap between two Octagon icons and former belt-holders (Franklin vs. Griffin), a fight that could produce the future of the 205-pound division (Jones vs. Bader), Miguel Torres’s breathtaking mullet, and the UFC debuts of some exciting imported talent from Japan.

Live UFC 126 results will be stacking up after the jump, beginning with a quick recap of the Yamamoto/Johnson Facebook match at 8:25 p.m. ET, leading into the Spike TV prelims broadcast at 9 p.m., and finally the pay-per-view broadcast at 10 p.m. So we’ve got a long night of fighting in front of us — but hey, nobody ever said being an MMA fan would be easy.